Who could have predicted that a first principles ground up new Internet protocol based on monarchism would be a difficult sell.
*I mean, I think that's what Urbit is. I've read multiple pieces describing it and I'm still not really clear.
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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Based on my avid following of the Trashfuture podcast, I can authoritatively say that the "Hoon" programming language relies primarily on Australians doing sick burns and popping tyres in their Holden Commodores.
What the hell is this
Urbit is a decentralized personal server platform based on functional programming in a peer-to-peer network.
Am I having a stroke? What does "functional programming in a network" even mean? Does it mean anything? Do you torrent lambdas?
You wouldn't download a closure
The Urbit software stack consists of a set of programming languages ("Hoon," a high-level functional programming language, and "Nock," its low-level compiled language)
Weird ass names aside (Hoon sounds like a slur or is it just me?), they built two languages? Also what does "its" refer to here, Urbit's? From context it's as if Nock was Hoon's language, but that doesn't make semantical sense.
Also editorial note, just say "a pair" if there are two, not "a set"...
a single-function operating system built on those languages ("Arvo"); a runtime implementation of that operating system ("Vere"),
What. What's a "runtime implementation of an OS"? What's Arvo if it's not implemented or doesn't run, a fucking abstract concept of an OS in someone's head?
A "single-function operating system" doesn't even mean anything. Do they mean a unikernel? That at least is an actual term.
public key infrastructure, built on the Ethereum blockchain ("Azimuth"), for each Urbit instance to participate in a decentralized network; and the decentralized network itself, an encrypted, peer-to-peer protocol.
What are we doing here.
The 128-bit Urbit identity space consists of 256 "galaxies", 65,280 "stars" (255 for each galaxy), and 4,294,901,760 "planets" (65,535 for each star) and comets under those.
What does any of this mean. Is it also a metaverse attempt? What the fuck is a planet in a network dude, would you call 123.73.41.0 more of an asteroid or a planetoid?
And now for a shot:
In 2022, the main software in an Urbit installation was a "bare-bones" text-based message board.
And chaser:
Tlon, the company founded by Yarvin to build Urbit, has received seed funding from various investors since its inception, most notably Peter Thiel, whose Founders Fund, with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invested $1.1 million.
So they built an artificially complex architecture, to the point where half of its description sounds made up, took the most complex kinds software engineering projects (a programming language and an OS), did them twice for good measure, slapped on a blockchain to be cool and hip I guess, for absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever. They didn't have a use-case that would warrant any of this engineering effort, all they wanted was a message board, a problem we have solved in the fucking 90s (? Maybe earlier?).
But it's good enough for the Lich King and Egg Boi to give them a million fucking dollars. God I hope at least they boughy some quality drugs with that money or else this was a giant waste of resources.
Conclusion: the Wikipedia article on Urbit is absolute garbage. I feel like I know less about what the fuck this thing is after I read it. Can anyone tell me why any of this? Why did they do this? Why do they need a custom OS? Who hurt them so bad they came up with such shitty names for everything? Would you nock a hoon or is that too vere?
EDIT: Bonus question, how is this pronounced? Instinctively I read the U as in "uranium", but the article writes "an Urbit", so it's a short U like in "full"?
IIRC, “Galaxies”, “stars” and “planets” used to have more sensible, down-to-earth names that described their function. Unfortunately, this was something like “empires”, “kingdoms”, “duchies” and such, making the creepily hierarchical neoreactionary philosophy behind the project a little too explicit, so they muddied the waters to something plausibly deniable as “just some nerd shit”
Wait so it's a decentralised network with a rigid authoritative hierarchy?
believe it or not, yes. there’s an extensive early awful.systems thread where @[email protected] and I found Yarvin’s original spec that described this (since then Urbit’s gotten much more intentionally obscure, but the ideological base is exactly the same) which I can dig up if you’re interested
non-edit: fuck it here you go, and if you’d like more psychic damage just search our local threads for urbit because there’s so much more and it gets so much stupider
lol i basically wrote that article
i'm sorry, i was describing something that is garbage
the short description is "lisp machines but networked, for nazis, and they don't fucking work"
i've always pronounced it ER-bit
lisp machines but networked
urbit’s even stupider than this, cause lisp machines were infamously network-reliant (MIT, symbolics, and LMI machines wouldn’t even boot properly without a particular set of delicately-configured early network services, though they had the core of their OS on local storage), so yarvin’s brain took that and went “what if all I/O was treated like a network connection”, a decision that causes endless problems of its own
speaking of, one day soon I should release my code that sets up a proper network environment for an MIT cadr machine (which mostly relies on a PDP-10 emulator running one of the AI lab archive images) and a complete Symbolics Virtual Lisp Machine environment (which needs a fuckton of brittle old Unix services, including a particular version of an old pre-ntp time daemon (this is so important for booting the lisp machine for some reason) and NFSv1 (with its included port mapper dependency and required utterly insecure permissions)) so there’s at least a nice way to experience some of this history that people keep stealing from firsthand
lol i basically wrote that article
Oops
To me it looked like someone wrote some babble about the architecture and then a Responsible Adult came in and added the thinly veiled sneers of "all they built is a text board, Yarvin is a certified idiot, none of this works"
I might read the primary source on this tomorrow if I hate myself hard enough, I am fascinated by why you need two languages and two OS things to run a nazi chatroom, sounds like some absolute pinnacle of human lack of thought
EDIT: I guess the actual concept might be so insane that there's no way to write an article about it that makes sense and doesn't use expletives
Yeah, there's a number of people here who actually met Yarvin before he
- became a complete asshole, you can not even imagine,
- became a proud fascist and *monarchist*, and
- lost his mind.
Many of us also have SW experience and have tried to look into Urbit and all came to the same conclusion - it all seems to be based on both giving stupid names to existing concepts, and blindly doing the opposite off whatever anybody has done before without regard to reason.
IIRC, a trivial but telling example of the latter is that for whatever reason, Yarvin decided that in all languages and code for all things Urbit, the boolean value true should be represented in binary form as 0, and false should be represented as non-zero.
Now it's fundamentally *arbitrary* whether 0 represents false or true, but deliberately making it the opposite of virtually every modern language implementation seems a perfect recipe for introducing unnecessary bugs.
Bourne shell inspiring yet another language!
Yeah, that was the only motivation I could think of. And even there it doesn't mean true/false, it means "no errors" and that only sometimes.
I guess the actual concept might be so insane that there’s no way to write an article about it that makes sense and doesn’t use expletives
this is basically the problem. there was an article there already but it was based entirely on urbit's descriptions of itself, which were all cultist gibberish. I went searching and found literally every Wikipedia-quality source I could. Most of these were about the people, not the tech.
Most shockingly to Urbit devotees and outsiders alike, the board welcomed back Curtis Yarvin, the project's founder, who left in 2019.
nothing has ever shocked me less than Yarvin “returning” to urbit
In 2015, a technical conference rescinded his speaking invitation. The following year, another tech conference lost sponsors and was almost canceled because it allowed him to speak, over objections that this verbose, bespectacled engineer would make attendees feel somehow "unsafe." (Perhaps some feared he would bore everyone to death by reading his posts aloud, or torture them with his poetry.)
[…]
While the cancel culture of the 2010s and early 2020s may be subsiding, bringing Yarvin back remains a calculated risk for Urbit, William Ball, the board member, said on the developer call.
these fuckers are still fucking seething over their adult baby godking being asked not to come to a functional programming conference because he publicly advocates for a fascist takeover of the United States, receives funding from fascists, does press interviews promoting the fascist influencer circles he hangs out in, and is the computer science equivalent of a flat earther. how will our industry ever recover from the absolutely no value that was lost by disinviting him?
Somehow ~~Palpatine~~ Yarvin returned
and Hochstein is 100% on board
“what kind of a boy is Curtis Yarvin?”
well… he’s a birthday boy
This is hilarious. For ages every time Urbit has appeared in tech aggregators the original connection with Yarvin has been raised, and the proponents have snippily replied he's not longer involved. No idea what passive-aggressive bullshit they'll invent next time now that he's back in charge, baby!
I'll say it again urbit is the most unintentionally funny software ever created
Didn’t the maintainers vote to rewrite all the documentation in Lojban once or something?
As David says, that was a fork, under this GH org. Source: I ran one of the stars, claimed here. However, it turns out that there's only maybe two dozen people interested in a far-left Lojbanic fork of Urbit, and the network is moribund.
CC @[email protected]; your dreams are fulfilled, sort of.
sadly that was a fork that went nowhere
god I hope this is true
to the extent that it's been created
Wait, I thought the whole point of the dumb thing was to beak up all the resources into crypto-crypto-objects. Doensn't anyone want to buy a galaxy or whatever?
Damn you, to this day I had no idea what his face looks like and it’s gotta be this golden retriever looking windwards type of visage?
He's exactly the Gilfoyle looking mother fucker you think he is.
also: remember that urbit literally doesn't work. the funding issues are cos they lost a huge chunk of the urbit ecosystem, who were techfash neoreactionaries like themselves and 100% on board with what urbit wanted - but they still needed a base system that like worked at all, so they moved to conventional Lisps instead
@self and i both keep saying we'll write that one up but never do, but it was a hoot
@self and i both keep saying we’ll write that one up but never do, but it was a hoot
oh yeah! I need to dig up my notes for that and finally polish it into a long post. the prominent post-urbit still-reactionary system I’m thinking of took a ton of (cited, this time) inspiration from Nix, and I’m wondering if I’ll notice a change in that project’s focus after Nix went openly fash and accepted a ton of funding from the same types of sources that fund urbit and its descendants
the proximate example is Kinode - who are 100% believers in what Urbit and Yarvin want - who had to move off Urbit to a more, ah, functional functional programming stack because Urbit didn't work
I need to look more into this, but I’ve got the sinking suspicion that the technofascists have come to a realization: that ultra-obscure non-functioning systems like urbit play well if your techfash inroad is forming an influential technocratic thinktank (and there’s plenty of precedent for exactly this type of shit working to gain lasting political influence), but it’s utterly worthless if your path to fascist takeover is through, say, the defense industry. urbit is useless for reliably launching or controlling a missile; urbit can’t even do normal desktop shit right, and unlike a lot of defense contracting failures, this is utterly obvious and can’t be papered over.
NixOS is too heavy to run on a missile (it might have a place onboard a drone, maybe), but Nix can easily be (and has been) sold as a massive boon to missile firmware development, and a way to modernize a number of launch and control systems external to a missile. that’s why Nix was a good fucking get for the fascists — it’s working, unique technology none of them were smart enough to come up with, its creators are too socially immature and hateful to know what happens when they become a nazi bar, and Nix itself is still obscure and impenetrable enough (and the techfash element of the community has absolutely ensured this has gotten worse) that having a monopoly on software engineering contractors with Nix expertise and clearance can still be used as a wedge to establish an unassailable position with a high level of political control.
Kinode can’t be used in a missile or a drone, but it’s definitely an adaptation of the non-language parts of urbit to something that wants to look like a more typical cloud deployment. I wish I could analyze what Kinode’s political inroad is, but all the docs on their terrible website 404, so I should dig in and see if they’re still active, or if their funders have decided there’s a more promising inroad elsewhere.
Nix is fash now? That's too bad, I love nix and nixOS :(
the technology is excellent, which makes what happened a shame. I’m still astounded that the fash elements of the community had this easy of a time getting their way.
and speaking of what happened, check out the little fascists who run the NixOS wiki (the third party one that was the only source of docs for a bunch of things for several years, to the point where the new official wiki just copied the third party wiki’s text on a bunch of topics) telling on themselves
External links: the fucking motte. All of it, not any particular discussion.
now I’m wondering if themotte was one of the places where they coordinated flooding the nix community with fash horseshit, or if they just feel that comfortable signaling that only fucking nazis are allowed in the Nix bar
Doesn't look like they did any coordinating (openly, at least), only 9 comments on NixOS, 4 in November when Srid went straight to themotte crying about being banned for CoC violation, and 5 on 5 May where they are baffled and unable to even understand criticism of JR/Anduril.
Incidentally, the "woke invasion" page says the author got banned in November, so I guess Shivaraj is an alias of Srid.
Jesus Christ
I did find lix, which is a nix fork that is at least run by very much not nazis, so I think I will be putting that into my system.
lix is really cool! it’s very important to have a Nix evaluator that isn’t under fash control because none of the technology can exist without the language, and they’ve made some big improvements already to Nix’s build system, ergonomics, and internal docs — namely, a lot of the improvements the fash parts of the community fought hard to block, because technology that’s both powerful and obscure like Nix can easily be leveraged for political gain (see my previous post on this topic if you’d like more details on what the political side of this most likely looks like). I’m hoping lix proves generally resistant to assholes coming and ruining things — unfortunately, what happened to Nix keeps happening with other open source projects.
aux is another project that’s along the same lines as lix. it used to be a nixpkgs replacement, but since then it’s become something that’s a bit harder for me to decipher but probably more promising if it works — I believe it’s a reworking of the Nix standard library and other foundational pieces to be less dependent on a centralized repo and more modular. they seem to be planning a package set (tidepool) on top of that new modular foundation too, plus they’re writing up a bunch of missing language docs. if what they’re doing pans out, aux and lix could be a good basis for a Nix replacement.
the full NixOS system is unfortunately still irreplaceable for me, which fucking sucks — every computer I touch still runs it (my desktops, my laptops, the Lemmy instance where this thread lives, my fucking air conditioner thermostats…). replacing the NixOS options set and all its services and mechanisms is definitely a big job, and nobody’s managed it yet — I’ve even briefly considered GuixSD, but it’s actively becoming more hostile to running on real hardware (in the stupidest GNU way imaginable) including the hardware I run NixOS on, and the packages I rely on the most are weirdly primitive in guix (including emacs of all things).
Aux also looks interesting and I will definitely consider using it. They also seem to plan on replacing NixOS at some point, which I am definitely exited for.
I installed lix today and was doing some edits to my configuration, and I noticed the errors now tell me where to find the mistake instead of just showing me three lines of code and making me guess where they are, so I am already very pleased with the switch.
Edit: I forgot to type this part out.
I am also bound to nixOS unfortunately. I used to reinstall my OS about once every two months until I found nixOS, and it is now also running on all of my devices. I really hope that a good replacement will present itself at some point, because I hate to be dependent on nazis for anything, even if they don't directly benefit from it.
ah shit, I wrote the above before the edit to Holium — I remember that twitter post! (also, xcancel link for anyone who wants to see this weird shit and can’t)
now that’s definitely worth digging into — I want to see the specific political angle these shitheads are going after. it really could be a renewal of the “web3 crypto OS, whatever the fuck that means” angle now that Thiel and company are pumping so much money into getting pro-crypto politicians elected
i think but cannot verify that Kinode is more of the same sort of guy (FP techfash)
Eagerly awaiting the writeup.
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